Twitter’s new product announcement schedule isn’t slowing down. The company today unveiled a number of new initiatives aimed at better serving conversations and the community using its platform, including support for crypto tipping, NFT authentication, and plans for other experiments designed to provide more context around a chat for those who have just joined. The company also said it is preparing to launch its creator fund in a few weeks to provide audio creators with access to financial, technical and marketing support.
While Twitter wasn’t yet ready to detail specifics, such as the size of the fund or the expected reach, in terms of participating creators, it’s a clear shot across the spectrum from a major competitor in social audio, the creator “accelerator” Clubhouse whose affiliate offered its participants brand deals or $5,000 per month during their participation in its program.
Similarly, Twitter sees its creator fund as one that isn’t meant to reward creators for the content they produce — like some rival funds floating around at Facebook, Instagram, Snap and elsewhere — but rather to help creators get started. audio productions on Twitter Spaces.
Image credits: I tweet
“Its purpose is really to provide that technical and marketing expertise,” noted Twitter’s Product Lead for Creative Monetization, Esther Crawford. “We think of it as a sort of stopgap solution. We want to join these people in other long term monetization features. But we want to give them an initial boost,” she said.
Spaces hosts will also be able to record and replay their programming – a move likely aimed at countering the threat of competing platforms, which tout recording as a key differentiator. That will launch in “a few months,” the company said.
Twitter also announced today several new products and enhancements to recently launched features.
One of these is a new feature that would allow his app to better serve creators working with NFTs, or non-fungible tokens — a way to certify digital assets, stored on the blockchain. Artists are now creating NFTs of their work which are sold on NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea, Rarible, Foundation, SuperRare and others.
Image credits: I tweet
Twitter says it plans to explore support for NFT authentication “soon.” This would allow NFT creators to connect their crypto wallets to Twitter in order to track and display their NFTs on the platform. This particular plan is still in the early stages as Twitter could not yet articulate how this would work. The company said it was testing different ideas to make creators with verified collections stand out more visually — perhaps with something like a differently shaped profile badge or avatar.
When asked for further details on its broader NFT roadmap, Twitter declined to comment. (Update, 9/29/21, Twitter appeared how the NFT feature can work.)
Another new feature in the crypto space is support for Bitcoin tipping. Twitter first introduced its Tip Jar feature in May as a beta product, allowing users to send and receive one-time payments through third-party services such as PayPal, Venmo, Patreon, Cash App, Bandcamp and others. Now the feature will expand to global audiences on iOS and Android soon and add support for Bitcoin tipping.
There will be several ways Bitcoin tips can work. Users will be able to add a Bitcoin Lightning wallet or their Bitcoin address in order to start receiving Bitcoin tips. Lightning wallets are popular among users in the crypto community because of their lower transaction fees, the company said. Twitter’s implementation of this uses Strike, a payment application built on the Bitcoin Lightning Network that allows people to send and receive Bitcoins for free and instantly, he said.
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In fact, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey this summer posted on Twitter that it was “only a matter of time” before Twitter built support for the Lightning Network, a layer on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, into its platform. At the time, there was some speculation that users would first see this kind of support in a micropayments product, which has now been proven correct.
Tip Jar will also add several other services, including GoFundMe and Brazilian mobile payment service PicPay.
Another new experiment called “Heads Up” (for now), is the first to give users a sense of the atmosphere of a chat before they enter.
One of Twitter’s thorniest issues is its inability to help people feel safe to share their thoughts and opinions on its network, which has served as a breeding ground for a culture of cancellation and where armies of trolls can descend on marginalized voices or others with whom they disagree. time – like activists, women in technology (as made famous with the Gamergate scandal) or female journalists.
Image credits: I tweet
In this area, Twitter has been working to create new features such as those that allow users to limit who can reply to their tweets, which it says has contributed to a drop in abuse reports over the past four weeks. .
Safety Mode has also been released in beta, which provides a sort of automated level of protection against harassment during a time of increased abuse. It created a way for people to silently remove followers as an alternative blocking. And today, Twitter says it will soon launch a new feature that will let users remove themselves from a conversation in which they’re mentioned, and is experimenting with a new feature called “word filters” that will ‘allow users to block abusive tweets that don’t cross the line to be against Twitter’s policy.
Image credits: I tweet
Twitter didn’t fully explain how it will measure the atmosphere of a conversation in its upcoming “Heads Up” feature in order to alert newcomers to the nature of the discussion. But it said it was looking into using data from its emoji reactions (which are only now in testing) and reply prompts, which warn users when they’re about to post something potentially offensive.
The company has been launching new products at an incredibly fast clip in recent months, with additions that have included an improved rapid audio chat platform on Twitter Spaces, the release of Communities, the interest-based creative platform. Super Follownewsletters via Revue purchase, tipping, a premium subscription service called Twitter Blue, crowdsourced fact-checking with Birdwatch, new e-commerce features, new profiles and tags, a revamped account verification system, chat controls, direct messaging improvements and more.
Today, it offered some updates on a handful of those products.
He said he’s working on more Spaces discovery tools that would make it easier to find Spaces at the top of the timeline and elsewhere in the app — a possible reference to the dedicated Spaces tab on mobile. It’s also expanding access to Ticketed Spaces, improving newsletter discovery, launching a new creator earnings panel, and working on more account tags — like those brands and ones that would help memorialize their accounts. the deceased – among others.
Image credits: I tweet
Twitter also outlined how it plans to handle moderation within its Communities feature, saying these interest-based destinations will have their own moderators and norms specific to that community, above and beyond I tweet The rules.
“It’s our first step toward decentralizing moderation so that your Twitter is your space,” explained Twitter’s Product Lead for Chat Safety, Christine Su, adding that Communities will open up to more people ” soon”.
More broadly, Twitter tried to explain its strategy, which is increasingly looking like “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.” In fact, she admitted – to some extent – it may be doing just that.
“You’ll continue to see us push toward this vision through experimentation and iteration,” explained Twitter’s Head of Consumer Products, Kayvon Beykpour. “You’ll see us share our progress publicly along the way, as we’ve done for the past few years. And you won’t see us hanging on to things that don’t work. We’ve done this with Fleets, and you’ll continue to see this with other explorations we test. We believe that if we don’t close things every once in a while, then we’re not going to get big enough bets,” he said.
Twitter’s announcements were detailed this morning in a press conference and question-and-answer session, before some of it was released. tidings on her corporate blog.
